The Alleenstraße

In the autumn of 1990, just weeks after the German re-unificiation, a letter to the ADAC club magazine sparked a campaign to save the “Alleen” – the roads in the former GDR which are flanked on both sides by rows of trees.

The result not only protected those roads from tree-felling and overuse by heavy goods vehicles, but the network was expanded across the country, including the western part of Germany, and now stretches for 2,900km from the northern point of Rügen at Putgarten near Kap Arkona, all the way down to Lake Constance on the Swiss border.

The road itself has signs along the route with “Deutsche Alleenstraße” in white text on a brown background, and free PDF maps can be downloaded from the alleenstrasse.com Website.

This is part of the road near Kluis on Rügen:

Deutsche Alleenstraße - near Kluis on Rügen

Störtebeker 2019: Oath of the Righteous

The middle of June and a trip to Rügen can only mean one thing: it’s time for a new production of the Störtebeker Festspiele.

Having returned to the beginning of the story last year, we fast forward to the year 1393 and the siege of Stockholm.  Margarete, Queen of Denmark and Norway, has occupied most of Sweden and is hoping to add a third crown to her collection.  However Stockholm refusing to surrender, with the pirates provided a supply route back to Mecklenburg.  Similar to the division of Berlin many hundred years later, the siege has torn families appart, in some case with members of the same family forced to fight each other.

The bastillion of Stockholm
The bastillion of Stockholm
[Read more…]

Störtebeker 2017: In the Shadow of Death

The end of the cycle at the Störtbeker Festspiele on Rügen can only mean one thing: Klaus Störtebeker is going to lose his head at the end of the evening.  But before we things get that far, there is a story to finish telling.

At the end of the 2016 play, Klaus Störtebeker and his men had moved to the North Sea and it is several years later, now in 1401, that we pick up the story.  Klaus (Bastian Semm) and Goedecke (Andreas Euler) are about to attack one of the stores in Hamburg, where Fronica (Karin Hartmann) is selling fish at the market.  They are successful, ultimately burning down the store after taking the contents back to their ships, but it only makes the elders in Hamburg more determined than ever to capture the pirates.

Klaus Störtebeker (Bastian Semm) coming out of the fogKlaus Störtebeker (Bastian Semm) coming out of the fog

Enter Simon von Ütrecht (Nicolas König) [Read more…]

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